The Election Results Deniers

It is becoming clear that the opposition to Donald Trump becoming president is not letting up. The latest effort is focused on the conspiracy theory that hackers, working for the Russian government, seized emails and other documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and entities connected to the Republican National Committee, but only leaked those related to the DNC, in order to help Donald Trump win the presidency.

Remember the outrage in the media when Donald Trump refused to say that he would automatically accept the outcome of the election? During the third of three presidential debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton, Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would honor the results of the election if he lost.

“I will look at it at the time. I’m not looking at it now. What I’ve seen is so bad,” Trump replied. “What I’m saying is I will tell you at the time…I’ll keep you in suspense.”

Hillary responded, saying, “That’s horrifying…That’s not the way our democracy works. We’ve been around 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections and we’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.” Media outrage echoed Hillary’s sentiments.

Late on the night of the election, into the morning of November 9, the Associated Press and the broadcast and cable networks all called the election for Trump. Hillary Clinton conceded, yet the left, who were so outraged by Trump’s position, are now the Election Results Deniers.

After the initial shock and hysteria of losing, the Democrats and their leftist allies in the media came roaring back. It was white supremacy, they claimed, along with fake news; the Electoral College; the news media; FBI Director James Comey; Peter Schweizer’s “Clinton Cash;” both the book and the documentary; WikiLeaks—and surely global warming must have figured in there somewhere. And of course, the Russians. They all conspired to rig the election in favor of Trump. Hillary apparently had nothing to do with her own defeat.

The fact that Hillary won by more than 2.5 million votes means that the Russians failed, if their goal was to help Trump win the most votes. Surely they didn’t expect that Trump would be the winner if he lost the popular vote by such a margin.

The Washington Post story that broke on December 9 was an effort to state definitively that not only did the Russians hack the DNC for their emails, but were specifically attempting to help Trump win. Yet when you dig deep into the article, and various other sources, you find that it is not so definitive after all.

For one thing, it says that White House officials wanted to publicly blame Moscow back in mid-September, but “worried that doing so unilaterally and without bipartisan congressional backing just weeks before the election would make Obama vulnerable to charges that he was using intelligence for political purposes.”

But doing it now fuels the movement to somehow deny Trump the presidency. Even if the electoral vote proceeds on schedule and without a hitch for the President-elect, this charge of Russian influence will haunt Trump’s presidency until he perhaps wins an even larger re-election victory four years from now.

But there are problems with the Post’s story. For one thing, the FBI doesn’t share the belief that there is proof of Russia specifically intending to help Trump. And there is the problem of James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who had previously admitted lying to Congress about an NSA program. Just last month he told a different story about what the Intelligence Community (IC) had learned about the Russian hacks.

According to a report on Fox News on Monday: “In a letter Monday to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said, ‘On November 17, 2016 you told the Committee during an open hearing that the IC (Intelligence Community) lacked strong evidence connecting Russian government Cyber-attacks and Wikileaks disclosures.’ In response to a question from ranking Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff (CA), Clapper had said, ‘As far as the WikiLeaks connection, the evidence there is not as strong and we don’t have good insight into the sequencing of the releases or when the data may have been provided. We don’t have as good insight into that.’”

And this morning, Reuters and others are reporting that Clapper’s office “has not endorsed [the CIA’s] assessment because of a lack of conclusive evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.”

On Monday, CNN reported that “the extent to which the Kremlin is tied to the hacks remains murky.” They added that “the hacks fit Russia’s M.O., but there’s still no smoking gun directly tying the Russian government to the theft of emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.”

In addition, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says that the material that they released didn’t come from any Russian hacks, but rather from insiders who leaked the material to them.

As David Sanger, a reporter for The New York Times who is also working on this story, said of the Obama administration, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” This raises the question, is Obama investigating who leaked this story to the Post and the Times? It seems like the answer is no, suggesting that he is behind the leak as a way of politicizing the issue, and putting pressure on Trump.

Another issue is that it is really Hillary who has had a tight relationship with Russia, especially when she was Secretary of State. She used that position as a cash cow for her family foundation. As we pointed out a few months ago, through Skolkovo and Uranium One, tens of millions of dollars flowed to the Clinton Foundation in return for incredible rewards for the Russians, including 20 percent of U.S. uranium reserves.

The information from WikiLeaks, wherever it came from originally, was extremely damning for the Democratic Party and for Hillary herself. WikiLeaks showed the coziness between the media and the Democrats, and how the DNC had its thumb on the scale to defeat her opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas showed how Hillary coordinated with the DNC, a super PAC, and various far-left activist groups to violently disrupt Trump rallies and blame it on Trump.

Is it really such a leap to not believe the intelligence analysis coming from the Obama administration? In August we learned how the intelligence prepared for Obama by Central Command (CentCom) was politicized, in essence to tell the President what he wanted to hear about progress in the war against ISIS. What about Director Comey recommending no indictment for Hillary, just days after Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with former President Bill Clinton? What about their use of the IRS to harass many conservative groups opposed to Obama’s policies? We know they politicized the talking points that Susan Rice was given for her Sunday talk shows the weekend after the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, which killed four Americans, and which Obama and Hillary lied about for weeks.

The real issue now, which few are speaking about, is whether or not what we know now is enough to result in overturning the results of the election. On December 19, the electors are set to vote. There have been efforts to cajole, threaten, and otherwise influence the electors before they vote. The Clinton campaign has gotten behind that movement. If Trump fails to get enough votes that day, it could go to the House of Representatives in January. The election was five weeks ago, and nerves are as raw as they were on election night. There are about five weeks more until the inauguration, if we get that far.

The Jill Stein recounts have largely been a bust, but there is liable to be more legal action. We’re in uncharted waters, and figure to be for some time, while the world adjusts to the new realities.

Author

Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media. He has produced and directed six documentaries including “Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope,” “The Clinton Legacy,” “TWA 800: The Search for the Truth” and “Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neoconservatism,” which aired on numerous PBS stations. In 2009 he produced a weekly public affairs show on PBS called “Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg.” Aronoff is a founding member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi.

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